[squeak-dev] Hello squeakers

casimiro barreto casimiro.barreto at gmail.com
Fri Mar 26 11:49:39 UTC 2010


Good morning Stephane,

On my part, welcome back. Just moments ago I was loading VMMaker into a new
image & I remembered you... IMHO your participation in this forum as well as
in the squeak community is very valuable.

Regarding the squeak vs pharo thing, I really don't see "competition" as a
problem. On the contrary if efforts cross-seed new ideas & developments it
will be a good thing.

About "rantings" I see that sometimes people start a really "religious"
(dogmatic) discussion about some things and get blind to possibilities. I
feel that the way forks happened in past reflect this problem of "dogma". If
a community can step over this way of thinking, then efficacy, efficiency
and quality of efforts increase.

Currently I see squeak, pharo & cuis as research efforts in different fields
ranging from academic to commercial (the order of factors doesn't matter).
What bothered me is that for a while communities became insulated so
exchange of experiences reached a low level. Now things seem to get better.

Nowadays, as one said, I'm a "lurker" in this community because I can't
publish what I'm doing. Things will change past June or July. Anyways it has
to do with distributed processing & things like that.

Best regards,

CdAB

2010/3/26 stephane ducasse <stephane.ducasse at free.fr>

> Dear Squeakers
>
> I want to send you a message because I estimate Squeakers and I want to
> open the door to see how new relationship can be build.
> So consider that as an open hand - even if my english may let you think
> otherwise.
>
>        First, Pharo is not against Squeak. We forked because we believed
> that we could not make Squeak move in any coherent direction. We are sure
>        that you understand our reasons.  Just think a moment about the
> amount of time and energy we invested in Squeak in the
>        past (I wrote more than anybody else books on squeak, build
> tutorials, lecture support, videos....- with esug over the years we spent
> more than
>        30 kEuros in Squeak related actions) so deciding to go for Pharo was
> not an easy choice but a necessary one: At one point I was thinking to quit
>        Smalltalk and go to see Ruby and Python for real. Pharo is the only
> way that I get back my fun in Smalltalk.
>
>        So what are my dreams?
>
> For Pharo
> ======
>        We want a clean, lean and fast Smalltalk. An implementation that
> makes other dynamic language jealous.
>        We want a place where we/you can innovate. We want people to be able
> to invent THEIR future.
>        We want a place where people can make money with it and build robust
> applications.
>
>        Being able to experiment fast is important but for that the system
> should be clean, robust and flexible.
>        Having a platform for experimentation requires that the platform is
> not experimental.
>
> About innovation I mean in no order:
>        Support for multitouch screen, bootstrappable Smalltalk,
> immutability bit and its impact, ephemerons,
>        new module system?, first class instance variables, using traits for
> real (like in ruby where any class can be a model
>        without inheriting from model), VAT-like system?, event system like
> in AmbiantTalk?,
>        I put ? because some of these should be implemented assessed
> tested... and understood deeply.
>
> About clean
>        Clean network, clean event system, clean object kernel, better
> compiler (open - we got first class instance
>        variable with no runtime penalties in one afternoon). Clean class
> builder...
>
> Now enough about Pharo. http://www.pharo-project.org/
>
> About Etoys
> ========
>        I love Etoys (we translated the book and did more presentations of
> etoys than most squeakers) but I do not like its implementation.
>        Why? Because it is bad. Any body that looks at it knows it. When I
> removed Etoys part from Pharo  I'm sad but there is no other choices. Now it
>        does not mean that I'm against Etoys and Etoys has the Etoys 40
> image (note that we collected in 3.9 most of the etoys fixes with little
> support                from Etoyers which forked way before, we did the same
> with the fixes of diego of Smalltalk). But again you can judge otherwise.
>
>
> About the ranting or the little war between Squeak and Pharo
> ======================================
>        Frankly I'm tired about us ranting against Squeak/andreas/... and
> the inverse. For example Traits are cool, Javascript and PHP
>        will probably have them as Perl-6, Scala, Fortress. Now Squeak can
> remove them. I have no problem with that. Seriously this is your decision.
>        People in squeak-dev can freely say negative points about me if this
> helps. I decided that I will not rant nor get negative feelings about that.
> I
>        found the red pill :)
>
>        *I* decided that I want to head to the future. So we will not rant
> nor make any bad statement about the past anymore. Not even report history
> or
>        on old facts: if you were there you should remember, else there is
> the archive :). This is my last mail on the past.
>        Frankly I have the best job I can dream about. I'm lucky just check
> my h-index for the fun, I have more than most researchers I know. In
> addition,      I loved working and learning from people like lukas, adrian,
> nicolas, levente, marcus, ..... The next 10 years should be the best of my
> life and I
>        will take advantage of that.  I want to have **10/15** years of pure
> fun and I will do it. I want and will create positive energy. Look at ESUG
>        we are doing a great job.
>
> About cross dialect energy
> =================
>        Now the key point of this mail. I **deeply** appreciate the attitude
> of people like nicolas, levente, and igor that do not bash us and help Pharo
>        but also Squeak. I sent this message mainly because of their
> attitude. I'm sad to see all this (their) energy duplicated. We cleaned and
> improved a
>        lot Pharo over the last two years (more than you may think) and we
> will continue. Squeak could have benefitted from it. Nicolas luckily for you
>        pushed a lot of our fixes in Squeak already. I'm getting the fixes
> of Squeak that are interesting for Pharo. Now depending on the Squeak vision
>        we could share some common things. May be we can build a better
> future together but not at all price. You see our goals is to get a clean,
> lean,        flexible and robust system. If you want to share something with
> us let us know. You know now the vision of Pharo.
>        Squeak may want to compete with us too. This is ok too.
>
> If you want to help us building our vision you are welcome. Our logo is a
> lighthouse and it means that it will stand and last long because it has to
> guide boats. So we will continue Pharo against  tempests and giant waves :)
>
>        https://gforge.inria.fr/frs/download.php/26678/pharoVideo.zip
>        http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2LeNBY_5gk
>        The video is really cool (dan this is the one you wanted on waves).
>
> Stef
>
>


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